Somehow traveling west reminds me more of our Native American heritage than when we travel east. Maybe it's just because watching the land change as we leave the Midwest and become more rugged and unforgiving it brings to mind those early TV shows we watched. The ones featuring Cowboys and Indians. Sadly, for most of the people I knew, those black and white images formed our perception of a multi-cultural community. Communities all but erased as America pushed west and the "royal we" took over the land.
Out here you are reminded every day that years before the first white settlers came across the horizon, Native American cultures thrived. And had been following a chosen way of life for hundreds, if not thousands, of years.
All that is different now. Native American culture sits at the back of the bus.
On this trip I am reading "The Museum of Extraordinary Things" by Alice Hoffman. It's an engrossing read, part history, part love story, part mystery. It is set in New York City in the early 1900's and has nothing to do with the West or with Native Americans. And yet there were a few sentences that made the connection for me. The narrator is talking about a wolf a friend asked him to care for after he died. "Though the horses in the stable below my studio panicked at the sight of him, the wolf ignored them.....I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North.....for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names."
That's what's happened here. As we stop at historical sites and read the history of each area we are reminded that the native peoples had their own name for landmarks, rivers, places, animals. They had sacred spaces where tourist attractions now stand. They were here before we were.....but white men came, set to change the world.....and gave all the wild things new names.
Not the first time in world history this happened.....and it won't be the last. But still....being here and reading this particular book. It made me stop and think.
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